Watts launches African-American channel

“There’s a whole lot more to the African-American community than entertainment and sports,” said J.C. Watts, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, who is switching gears from a newsmaker to a newsman. With the help of Comcast and DishNet, Watts plans to launch the first cable channel dedicated to the African-American perspective. (The only channels dedicated to African-American audiences today are BET and TV One, both of which have an entertainment focus.) The Black Television News Channel is scheduled to launch in early 2009. Just in time to inaugurate the first black president?

“Political news is just one facet of American life,” said Watts, who added that the channel will not have a partisan bent. So don’t worry — he has no plans to become the black Rupert Murdoch.

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Q: Why a news channel?

A: I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television’s most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options. The African-American community is, I think, news-starved and underserved. You’ve got about 70 successful Hispanic channels. We think we are meeting a need.

Q: What type of programming will the BTNC have?

A: We’ll provide about 16 hours of original news coverage, nonpartisan commentary, information, educational programs that I think represent a diverse African-American viewpoint. When you look at cable, you see African-American faces, but you don’t see African-American news.

A: I think there’s more news than — obviously, Barack Obama is news. Red, yellow, brown, black or white, what he is doing is news. Now, if he becomes president, then that surely would provide a lot of content, but I think news is more than presidential elections or the war in Iraq.

Q: So then how would the channel handle today’s news differently than CNN does?

A: Obviously there’s Katrina, there’s Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright, but I think with Rev. Wright, there was a perspective never told even in that. It would have been easy to listen to the news coverage on Rev. Wright and say that all African-American churches are like that. It’s a different culture. When you get things like that in politics, it’s often difficult to make sense out of them, but I do think there was a perspective there [that] was overlooked.

Q: What else is African-American news?

A: I think the Tuskegee experiment. That’s something that we hear a lot about, but you never have any news organizations peel the onion. There’s a lot of things out there in terms of investigative reporting that can be health-related, education-related, economically related. But the fact is the African-American community, by and large, has been left out of the dialogue.

Q: What would your role be at the organization?

A: I think the mission for us — BTNC — is to create a venue that the African-American community, or anybody for that part, that they can come to a certain venue and get reliable, credible information and resources. It hasn’t been determined yet what my role would be, other than I know I will be involved in making sure that we stay true to that mission, to that cause. You won’t see me trying to manage a news channel.